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Massimo Rosati +

Massimo Rosati (1969-2014) was the founding director of CSPS. He grew up and did his schooling and undergraduate studies in Rome. In 1993 he took his degree in Sociology at the University “La Sapienza” of Rome, with a thesis on Habermas’ “Theory of Communicative Action”, that in 1994 became, under the title Consenso e razionalità (Armando editore), the first Italian monograph on Habermas’ book. In 1998 he took a Doctorate in Political Sociology, University of Florence. He was based first at University of Perugia and then at the University of Salerno, until 2008. Until 2014 he was Associate Professor at University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he taught Sociology. In Italian he also published Il patriottismo italiano. Culture politiche e identità nazionale (Laterza 2000), and Solidarietà e sacro (Laterza 2002), a theoretical investigation on the role of the concept of the sacred in classical and contemporary social theory. In English he published articles on Durkheim and contemporary social theory in The Journal of Classical Sociology, Durkheimian Studies, Philosophy and Social Criticism. He edited the new Italian edition of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Meltemi 2005). With Alessandro Ferrara he wrote Affreschi della modernità. Crocevia della teoria sociale (Carocci 2005), and with W.S.F. Pickering he co-edited Suffering and Evil. The Durkheimian Legacy (Berghan Books 2008). Recent publications were Ritual and the Sacred. A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self(Ashgate 2009); and, coedited with Kristina Stoeckl, the volume entitled Multiple Modernities and Postsecular Societies (Ashgate 2012). Rosati was working on the book: The Making of a Postsecular Society. A Durkheimian Approach to Memory, Pluralism and Religion in Turkey, when suddenly he died, so Prof. Alessandro Ferrara edited the book and Ashgate published it in 2015. See http://csps.uniroma2.it/massimo-rosati/.

By Kristina Stoeckl

Massimo Rosati has left us much too early. I got to know Massimo Rosati only four years ago when I joined the faculty of the University of Rome Tor Vergata on a temporary fellowship. Our collaboration turned into friendship soon and our research interests coincided almost naturally (Massimo’s interest in post-Kemalist Turkey as a “postsecular society in the making”, my interest in post-Soviet Russia). Massimo spearheaded a number of concrete projects which, with hindsight, make the time spent at Tor Vergata one of the most productive of my professional life so far. The foundation of CSPS was followed by a tight schedule of activities: the creation of the book-series Modernità Postsecolare; fund-raising; workshops (we published the results of one of these workshops as Multiple Modernities and Post-Secular Societies in 2012); lectures; a new project on religious assistance in Italian penitentiary institutions with Valeria Fabretti (all of this information is contained on this site); nerve-wrecking discussions with the administration and heart-lifting exchanges that reminded us what we were doing this for. Hardly a week has passed in the entire period I have known Massimo (apart from holidays) where Massimo and I would not be in contact via phone or mail in order to discuss issues and plans related to CSPS. Apart from the activities related to CSPS, which were the most common theme of our conversations, Massimo was engaged in various other professional activities. One was the work on his forthcoming book The making of post-secular society. The Turkish Laboratory. This book constituted a new step in Massimo’s long engagement with Durkheim, on the one side, and Habermas, on the other. Massimo’s work was inspired profoundly by Durkheim. Among his works we find his influential Italian translation of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2005, with a second edition in 2013), his original reinterpretation of Durkheim in Solidarietà e sacro (2002); his co-editing, with W.S.F. Pickering, of the anthology Suffering and Evil. The Durkheimian Legacy (2008) and his book Ritual and the Sacred. A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self (2009). But he also continued to be in critical conversation with Jürgen Habermas, ever since his first academic dissertation on Habermas’ theory of communicative action in 1993 (published in 1994). Massimo had the necessary curiosity and intellectual dedication to fill theoretical debates with empirical analysis. He looked at the religious world of post-Kemalist Turkey with sympathetic and critical eyes and, in The making of post-secular society, has brought together his neo-Durkheimian approach to religion with a critical rethinking of the Habermasian notion of the post-secular. I have learned a lot from Massimo’s conceptual and methodological approach, and I am sure that it will continue to inspire also other researchers in the future. The other area of professional activity of Massimo Rosati was the official, the institutional side. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Florence in 1998, he obtained a post as assistant professor at the University of Perugia and then shortly thereafter, at 35, he was hired as associate professor by the University of Salerno. Rosati taught sociology in Salerno for slightly longer than three years and then, in 2008, moved to the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he earned a reputation as dedicated teacher of general sociology who took very serious his work as supervisor of numerous MA and PhD theses. Two months ago, in December 2013, he turned out to be the youngest sociologist in Italy to obtain the newly established “habilitation” as a full professor. He was a professional who navigated skillfully, patiently and with the necessary degree of irony both international and Italian academic waters with their often diverging incentive-structures. I admired him for this capacity. He was an example for a whole generation of young academics. Massimo Rosati was an active member of the editorial board of several sociological journals and joined many of those networks where today the mission of the university, in times of over-bureaucratized routines and the attendant deadline-driven frenzy, seems to have migrated: the Gallarate-Cortona permanent seminar in Critical Theory, the Urbino-group and the Colloquium Philosophy & Society in Italy, the yearly Prague conference Philosophy and Social Science, the Istanbul Seminars of ResetDoC, the various Centers for Durkheimian Studies (especially in UK and Brasil), the Hrant Dink Foundation in Turkey, the Center for Critical Theory of Religion. In November 2013, he was furthermore nominated director of the Roman Center for Jewish Studies (CERSE). His dedication as a public intellectual and his impact on the Italian cultural life can also be felt on the pages of his blogLiving Together, Differently, on the website of Reset, with posts about memory, post-secularism, the bridging of cross- cultural and religious divides. His last post was a reflection on ritual and remembrance, dated 27 January, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, three days before passing away. Massimo Rosati has left us much too early. His dedication to his family, his capacity for hard work, his respectful care for his friends and his ability to translate his intellectual and human curiosity into an admirable academic output – all this has been interrupted suddenly and cruelly by an unforeseeable deterioration of his health. I wish I would never have had to write these lines. To Massimo, in highest esteem.